Good journalism

Chris Hedges has a new book out, a really terrible book on the putative ‘new’ atheists. It’s so stupid it’s unreadable. This is a little surprising, since he was a foreign correspondent for the NY Times for several years, and even though the Times is not nearly as clever as it thinks it is, I would expect it to be above the kind of counter-factual drivel Hedges perpetrates in I Don’t Believe in Atheists. Or would I. No on second thought maybe I wouldn’t. Anyway the book is the kind of stupid that makes your jaw drop as you read. You don’t have to wait long, either – only five pages in you find

[The liberal church] accepts along with the atheists and the fundamentalists, Pangloss’s rosy vision in Voltaire’s Candide that we live in ‘the best of all possible worlds’ and that if we have faith and trust in the forces around us, ‘all is for the best. It is this naive belief in our goodness and decency – this inability to face the dark reality of human nature, our capacity for evil and the morally neutral universe we inhabit – that is the most disturbing aspect of all these belief systems.

He’s including atheism in that – specifically the atheism of what he calls ‘the new atheists.’ (He claims they call themselves that, which is typical of his respect for accuracy.) Really?! Dawkins and Hitchens and Dennett think we live in the best of all possible worlds? Which Dawkins and Hitchens and Dennett has he been reading?

And he enlists this kind of wildly inaccurate characterization in a stupidly belligerent attack on people and ideas and books that don’t exist. It’s cheap stuff. (I’ve heard him on the radio, too, out pushing his book – he works himself into an unpleasant lather of rage at these non-existent atheists. I felt dirty after hearing him.)

The “new” atheists, in the name of reason, science and progress, endow themselves with the moral right to abuse others in the name of their particular version of goodness…These atheists, like religious fundamentalists, live in the illusion of a binary world of us and them, of reason versus irrationality, of the forces of light battling the forces of darkness. And once you set up this world, you are permitted to view as justified military intervention, occupation and even torture – anything, in short, that will subdue what is defined as irrational and dangerous.

22 Responses to “Good journalism”

Chris Hedges sounds a bit like John Gray. I wonder what it is in the water that brings out this trait in people?

Thanks for doing this. I had read about Hedges’ book, and I wondered about it, but didn’t want to spend the money. I haven’t heard him speak, but I feel a bit dirty just hearing about him, the kind of uncleanness that one feels after visiting a Christian bookshop.

It’s astonishing, when you stop to think about it, that someone should write a book entitled “I don’t believe in atheists”, and then spend over two hundred pages talking about them, and about how dangerous they are!

The really amazing thing, after having read the Globe and Mail article (I thought Bryson Brown did very well), is that Hedges thinks that religion is really about forgetting oneself! Where on earth did he get that idea? Just think about Jesus. After all, he went around saying things that, if anyone else were to say it, we’d think him/her a megalomaniac. In fact, Keith Ward, in his book “Ethics and Christianity”, says that if Jesus were taken to be an ordinary human being, he would seem ‘deluded, arrogant and intolerant,’ but ‘if one grants the existence of God and the unique status of Jesus in relation to him, these characteristics of his reported life become quite natural and appropriate.’ (28) How’s that for a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

But Christians are the same. They talk regularly about humility, but when it comes to the crunch, they’re all elect or predestined or saved or something that puts them in a class by themselves. Why does Hedges thing it’s really all about being good neighbours? Especially, since he knows how deeply engrained our tendency to evil really is!

I imagine he has read an article by SJ Gould at some point in his life and has somehow stumbled from a hazy recollection of Gould’s characterisation of “panglossian selectionism” to his current idiocy.

Is it one of those anti-atheist books that rails against what the atheists supposedly do and say with very little mention or quotation of what they atually do and say?

Unlike Dawkins’s book, lots of these recent screeds seem to treat the concept of ‘new’ atheists as a simple foil onto which they can project their own fears and views with little reference to the actually existing individuals and their words.

On this general theme, has anybody read “The Ignorant Atheist” by the appallingly-arrogantly named blogger ‘Vox Day’, which claims to rebut Dawkins et al on (allegedly) ‘factual’ grounds…?

I’ve read some of his (for it is indeed a ‘he’ – Theodore someone or other?) blog postings, and based on the quality of those (and the fact I have little time), haven’t checked-out the book. :-)

The crits I’ve read aren’t encouraging (for him, at any rate), but I have yet to find a nice, destructive ‘line-by-line’ refutation online…? (I know, real scientists are actually busy people, who shouldn’t have to waste their time chasing-up factual errors in every single damn publication out there, but it would be nice…)

Who said this about the sort of munition that kiled the Reuters cameraman in Gaza

‘If you’re actually certain that you’re hitting only a concentration of enemy troops . . . then it’s pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they’re bearing a Koran over their heart, it’ll go straight through that, too. So they won’t be able to say, “Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.” No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.’

from

Adam Shatz, “The Left and 9/11,” The Nation (23 September 2002).

Yes it’s top New Atheist and poster boy for Butterflies and Wheels, Christopher Hitchens.

I’d guess Ophelia feels dirty after reading stuff like that, but for very different reasons.

‘As a follow-up to this post concerning the recently omnipresent Christopher Hitchens, I was talking electronically to my friend Ophelia Benson about him, commenting on the fact of how well he seemed to have been received in the UK’

Ophelia

‘I know. It is fascinating the way people are obviously – what – overwhelmed by him despite disagreement. But how can they help it? He really is extraordinary. I mean seriously, really, literally extraordinary. I’ve thought so for years – there is no one else like him. No one. No one that clever, articulate, widely read and remembering all of it; witty, funny, rude, histrionic, energetic, profane, etc etc. Philip Dodd said someone had written that he’s the best essayist since Orwell. Please. Orwell was good, but he was nowhere near that good. I would say he’s more like the best essayist since Hazlitt.’

I think Hitchens is a brilliant essayist. That doesn’t mean that I agree with everything he says, and it certainly doesn’t mean he’s a ‘poster boy’ for Butterflies and Wheels. Do you have comprehension problems, ‘resistor’? That’s something I said to Norm Geras in an email, which he posted on his blog with my permission. It’s nothing to do with B&W. B&W doesn’t have ‘poster boys.’ Don’t be stupid.

This is probably too late to reply to ‘resistor’s’ idea that I’m doing the guy’s work for him (that is Hedges, I think) when I speak about the uncleanness I feel after having beein in a Christian bookshop.

Well, yes, I do. Even as a vicar I felt unclean after walking between bookshelves laden with smarmy lies about God’s love and goodness and how all you have to do is ….. It really made me feel sick. Once, I had to to into one just to get something for the church. The woman at the counter asked if we wanted our names put on the mailing list. I was in clericals, and my wife said, ‘No thanks, we’re not really Christians, you know.’ We got a wonderfully blank stare of uncomprehending horror. But after walking through aisles of sticky sweet idiocy and lies, this was something that neither of us wanted to be identified with. Does that answer your question, resistor?

Haven’t read this book by Hedges, but certainly found his American Fascists to be intelligent, well-considered and -researched. Don’t know about the pangloss bit, but I’ve certainly read enough judgmentalism and conceit from atheists and agnostics on blogs to know that that part of human nature is not exclusive to theists. Atheists can be pricks, too, while espousing their beliefs. Hitchens, whom I find charming except when it comes to post-9/11 pontifications, is an excellent case in point. Dawkins has had his moments, too. Is this a surprise? It may not be the point of Hedges’ book, but it surely can’t be a surprise to anyone that those who agree with one are not, by virtue of that fact, exempt from standard human foibles.

Of course atheists can be pricks too, Dawkins and Hitchens very much included. But that’s not the extent of Hedges’s claims, to put it mildly. I thought his American fascists book was good too – that’s one reason I’m so taken aback by the awfulness of this one. Really – I’m not misrepresenting it – it’s appallingly bad. Read just the first few pages in a bookstore (that’s how I got interested enough to request it from the library!), you’ll see.

However, Hedges has a lot of justified anger about humanity in him. I found his book about the seductive power of war, “War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning”, incredibly insightful and moving. He has seen his fair share of death and murder firsthand, and has a revulsion for the tribalism and dehumanisation of the “other side” which leads to violence. I certainly understand why he would be concerned by the hawklike views of Hitchens and Harris– they concern me too.

Which isn’t to say that he isn’t unfairly projecting these attributes onto Atheists (or, sorry, the so-called “New Atheists”) as a whole. In other words, making the same error in judgment that he has so rightly called out others for in the past.

But still, I hope you don’t use this as an excuse to disregard everything that Hedges has ever said. (Any more than you do with Harris for his harmful views on torture, or Hitchens for his disgusting views on the necessity of this unnecessary bloodbath in Iraq.) Hedges has been an important voice on other issues, and I hope he will be again in the future.

No, I won’t use this as an excuse to disregard everything that Hedges has ever said – but I will say it has made me more skeptical about him. If I read American Fascists again it will be with the awareness that he can be appallingly careless of the truth.